A Beautiful Mind (Film)

Introduction In A Beautiful Mind (2002) Russell Crowe portrays real-life Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash. He delivers a thoughtful, measured and moving performance directed by Ron Howard. Nash was a student in 1947 reading mathematics at Princeton University. He delivered a paper on game theory (the mathematics of competition) that overthrew the accepted ideas about economics, only for his mind to later succumb to what was then diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. Nash, with the considerable help and forbearance of wife Alicia (Jennifer Connolly), fought his disease and continued his mathematical work (still teaching even by the age of 73). He won the Nobel Prize in 1994. As a testament to the high heritability of schizophrenia his son, also a mathematician, reportedly had schizophrenia. The latter point is not mentioned in the film. Despite the romanticisation necessary to sell the movie to a studio and an audience, the film is reasonably realistic although it concentrates on visual hallucinations (rather than the more frequent auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia) for cinematic effect. Howard very prudently took pains to carefully research his film. He took advice from leading psychiatrists such as Professor Max Fink to avoid most errors that typically litter other directors' work on mental illness. Professor David, professor of neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry reviewed the film (BMJ, Vol 324, 491) and comments on the psychopathology behind paranoid delusions. He links the success mathematical ability of Nash to the psychology of aberrant connections between events thus: "For someone who could produce mathematical formulae to explain apparently random behaviour and who could reduce human interaction to the rules of a game, it was a small step to seeing meaningful patterns in the random outpourings of newspapers and magazines - hidden messages from Soviet spies, warnings of Armageddon." The psychiatrist in the film, Dr Rosen (played by Chistopher Plummer) delivers the standard treatment of the day - insulin shock therapy combined with antipsychotics. The insulin shock therapy looks horrific with ten weeks of therapy with five treatments per week. According to the film insulin is administered intramuscularly and the resulting hypoglycaemia is allowed to induce bilateral convulsions. This is not quite what I had understood insulin therapy to be. Elsewhere in these pages is an account of insulin coma therapy by the contemporaneous UK doyen of physical treatments, Dr William Sargant. In his book the fits are a 'complication' of treatment i.e. an unwanted side effect.

In the film the precise nature of the oral treatment for schizophrenia is not mentioned although two kinds of tablets, presumably an antipsychotic (perhaps chlorpromazine marketed in the US as thorazine) and an antiparkinsonian drug are seen to be administered. After release from hospital the side effects of the drugs (fogging of his mathematical mind and sexual side effects) lead Nash to stop compliance. His relapse is described with the recurrence of paranoid delusions about the Cold War and the vivid reappearance of visual and auditory hallucinations. Nash's hallucinations are remarkably consistent in form through the years of his illness and Rosen deduces that some of his college colleagues (such as a biology stduent room-mate seen earlier in the film) were in fact hallucinatory in nature. Thus Nash is accompanied in the film by a trio of halucinatory characters that never quite leave him - a CIA supervisor, his college room-mate and a little girl who is his room-mate's niece. There is one very scary moment in the film where his insight is so impaired off medication that his ability to parent is dangerously diminished. He is looking after his son is in the bath. The water is running and whilst Nash believes that his ex-room-mate is looking after his son he wanders elsewhere in the house. The waters...

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“A BeautifulMind” is a movie that was based off a true story of the Nobel Prize winner John Nash, who suffered with schizophrenia upon entering Princeton University. Schizophrenia is not a personality disorder, but the splitting of the mind, which can cause people to hear voices, but will not change into multiple personalities. Nash’s symptoms went unnoticed during his college career, which promoted the disease to worsen over time because of the lack of treatment. In the movie Nash’s schizophrenia is easily classified with the positive symptoms of a schizophrenic such as, withdrawal from peers, hallucinations, and paranoia; these are only some of the symptoms being portrayed in the movie. Although the movie did not give a complete analysis of a schizophrenic, this film did an excellent job at conveying the daily sufferings a person with schizophrenia endured in their everyday life.
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JOHN FORBES NASH, JR. AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
A powerful exploration of how genius and madness can become intertwined, the feature film, A BeautifulMind, was inspired by the life of Nobel Prize winning mathematician and schizophrenic John Nash (PBS Online, 1999-2002).
Nash, known as a mathematical genius and one of the most original minds of the 20th century, made his breakthrough as a twenty-year-old graduate student at Princeton University with a remarkable proof in the field of game theory. His thesis of the dynamics of human conflict revolutionized economics, and eventually won him the Nobel Prize (PBS Online, 1999-2002).
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...Film Analysis: A BeautifulMind
I. Introduction
For this assignment, I choose to view A BeautifulMind, which is a biography based on the true life story of a math prodigy, John Forbes Nash Jr. The movie is a brilliant and touching portrayal of the destruction of the mind by schizophrenia, paranoia, and the effect of ostracism. These psychological concepts and conditions are clearly shown by the main character, played by Russell Crowe. Two of the concepts extensively described in this paper are schizophrenia and the concept of paranoia.
II. Plot Review
The movie is loosely based on the book of the same name and tells the story of John Forbes Nash Jr. At the beginning of the film, the character John Nash arrives as a new student at Princeton University. He is introduced to his imaginary roommate Charles, who would later become his best friend, as well as a group of male students who hang out together. The first part of the film shows Nash's intellectual concepts and his social deficiencies. In college Nash begins to work on the concept of governing dynamics. During the entire first part of the film, Nash does not know that his roommate and best friend, his friend's young niece and a mysterious Department of Defense agent are all hallucinations and are part of a psychotic ailment known as schizophrenia.
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“A BeautifulMind” is a sad yet unique, inspiring film. The film was directed by Ron Howard and provided people a whole new perspective on psychological disorders. When people generally hear the words “mental illness,” the thoughts of crazy, insane, different, abnormal and weird come into place. “A BeautifulMind,” based on a true story and a novel by Sylvia Nasar, has proven the standard thoughts to be inaccurate.
John Nash was a man of extraordinary character. He held a position of great intelligence and had proven it to be true when he was awarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. Nash was also faced with great difficulty when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia (Lipovetsky, 2009). After watching the movie for the first time, it is clear to see John Nash is not the average person, but it was quite a shock to find out he had a psychological disorder as severe as schizophrenia. After watching the movie again, knowing what he had been diagnosed with, the picture became all too clear. It was very obvious that he suffered from schizophrenia because of the symptoms he had shown.
There are predominantly three phases associated with schizophrenia. The beginning stage, or the prodromal stage, is where the symptoms start to develop and this phase can last for up...

...WEEK 3
A BeautifulMindFilm Analysis
xxxxxx x. xxxxxx xx
University of Phoenix - xxxxxxxxxx Learning Center
Economics for Business I
ECO/360
xx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx, Instructor
August 10, 2006
Background
It is 1947 and John Nash has arrived at Princeton for graduate study in mathematics. "The mysterious “West Virginia genius" has no prep school legacy or old money ties to cushion his entry into the Ivy League - just Princeton's most prestigious fellowship to signify that he does indeed belong. It's not an easy fit for Nash, or for Princeton. Social niceties mean nothing to him; neither does attending class. He is obsessed with just one thing: finding a truly original idea. That, he's convinced, is the only way he will ever matter.
Relevance to Economics
Princeton's math department is brutally competitive and some of Nash's classmates would love to see him fail. Still, they tolerate him, and inadvertently incite him to greatness. He's with them one night in a local bar when their reaction to a hot blonde grabs his attention. As Nash observes their rivalry, the idea that has been haunting him bursts into focus. His resulting paper on game theory - the mathematics of competition - boldly contradicts the doctrines of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. One-hundred-fifty years of accepted thought is abruptly outdated, and Nash's life is changed forever.
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...A BeautifulMindFilm Analysis
This movie is based on the true story of the brilliant mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. He made remarkable advancements in the field of mathematics at a young age and had a very promising future. Unfortunately, John Nash had problems deciphering the difference between reality and hallucinations. He had a mental disorder known as Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a severe, complex illness that causes hallucinations and can affect a person’s ability to think clearly, manage feelings, make decisions, and relate to others.
From the beginning of the movie it is not hard to find John Nash to be a little eccentric and odd. His social skills were a little off, and he seemed to never really relate to anyone; a potential warning sign of schizophrenia. It was not unusual for a person so bright to exhibit these characteristics, so they were easily written off as quirks by the viewers, and by the characters in the movie. He went on to have a seemingly very eventful life. It appeared that he was hired by the secret service to complete tasks for the government because of his extreme intelligence, and he had befriended a fellow Princeton student named Charles. He also went on to marry Alicia who was a former student of his at MIT that he was quickly intrigued by. Up until the shift in the movie, this was John Nash’s reality.
About in the middle of the story it was revealed that this secret life of his was all...

...The film “A BeautifulMind” effectively portrays the life of a person living with schizophrenia and offers viewers several comments on the effects of mental illness without limiting the scope to simply this aspect. Being a genius does not preclude the possibility that someone has a mental illness such as schizophrenia, and such is the case in the character of John Nash, the mathematician and Nobel Prize winner portrayed in the movie, partially about abnormal psychology, “A BeautifulMind.” John Nash clearly has schizophrenia and suffers from severe mental illness, as he experiences most, if not all, of the symptoms that are required to make a diagnosis of this mental illness. The symptoms the viewer of the film “A BeautifulMind” notices include auditory and visual hallucinations, paranoid ideations, delusional thinking, and a distorted perception of reality, all of which help psychologists determine and diagnose schizophrenia.
It is worth noting that the viewer of the movie “A BeautifulMind” observes how these symptoms of schizophrenia have an impact on various aspects of John Nash’s activities of daily living. His relationships with his family, friends, and colleagues are disrupted by the intrusiveness of the symptoms of his mental illness, especially because he is perceived as being so smart and the bizarre behaviors he...